With Friends Like These

After shepherding West Virginia into legal existence with its own government and representatives in Washington, Francis H. Pierpont made a surprising decision. Instead of remaining with his friends, family and new duties in the state capital, Wheeling, in late 1863 he headed east toward Alexandria, Va., to take up a much more challenging task: governor of the Restored State of Virginia – in effect, the government in exile.

Whereas West Virginians were largely unified behind the Union and its war effort, the residents of federally occupied northern Virginia still refused to acknowledge the government in Washington. It was a territory occupied uneasily by the Union Army, and its waters were patrolled only sporadically by the Union Navy. Guerrillas, bandits and general lawlessness were common.

Still, Pierpont could not have predicted that his greatest troubles would arise not from Confederate soldiers, sympathizers, spies, smugglers and night riders, but from one of his own: Gen. Benjamin Butler, a Massachusetts politician who once thought Jefferson Davis a fit man for the presidency of the United States.

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Francis H. PierpontCredit West Virginia State Archives

Butler became infamous across the South for his seizure of slaves from their owners as “contraband of war” while in Tidewater Virginia in 1861, and his rough-handed military occupation of New Orleans the next year. He was eased out of command after complaints mounted, but now, having backed the Emancipation Proclamation and, with an eye toward postwar politics, become a Republican, he was given control of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina in November 1863.

Butler set about imposing his will on “occupied territory” from back inside the moat of Fortress Monroe on Hampton Roads. His military reach, however, did not extend to the parts of Virginia closest to Washington – in other words, Pierpont’s territory.

At the time, Pierpont’s relationship with the Lincoln administration was strong. He had stood fast for the Union, recruited troops vigorously, and governed his part of Virginia effectively under difficult circumstances – balancing civil authority with military necessity. His relationships with Union commanders as different as George B. McClellan and Jacob Cox in western Virginia had been professional and courteous.

In a move that the administration believed would help Pierpont, his part of occupied Virginia was exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation. In Washington, many viewed the restored government as a model for other Confederate states in re-establishing civil authority.

Once in Alexandria, Pierpont called for local and state elections to legitimize civil authority and a constitutional convention to eliminate slavery, as West Virginia’s Constitution called for, and to establish free public education. As could be expected in a section of the state that voted heavily for secession, only a few thousand men were allowed to vote, or even turned out. Nonetheless, the governor took the positive results as a mandate. It was only a matter of time before he came to blows with Butler.

By spring, the two men were battling over everything from liquor licenses in Norfolk and Portsmouth to determining which officials were fit to run those cities and other municipalities held by the Union; they fought over who could appoint petty officials to regulate city markets, and whether civil authorities – including state courts and local prosecutors — had power in those localities.

Over a glass of ale, an angry Pierpont told an acquaintance of Butler that the “patron saint” of all that was wrong in Virginia was the general who “transported the forty thieves from Boston” – a reference to the number of Northern administrators and businesspeople operating in Virginia who had been accused of corruption. He added that he intended to send to Lincoln and Congress a 40-page memo documenting the continuing outrages, from real-estate seizures from anyone suspected of Confederate sympathies to the imposition of martial law.

The news of the memo sped to Butler, who readied his own defense to his friends in Congress. It also appeared in the Richmond Dispatch, under the headline “Another exposition of the thief Butler.” While noting that those named as suffering in Pierpont’s complaint were Unionists, the Petersburg, Va., Christian Sun chimed in: “The expose is sufficient to blacken the character of any man for all time. … They have thrust themselves into the mouth of the Beast, and now let them roll in agony, and little do we care for their sufferings.”

Pierpont was as good as his word, and soon won to his side Attorney General Edward Bates, who wanted to establish civil law wherever practicable in the South. Early on and continuing into the 1864 election year, Bates was disturbed by the lengths that commanders – from McClellan to Butler and others – went to in order to impose military authority over civil officials.

By the summer of 1864, and almost 200 miles from Washington, an equally frothing Butler drafted another defense that he wanted published under someone else’s name in several pro-military newspapers. He ridiculed that “Would-be Governor Pierpont” and blasted “His Pseudo Excellency” as “an accomplice with smuggler aides of the enemy, disloyal men, corruption of officers, bribers and suborners of perjury.” He also used the department’s house newspaper in Norfolk, the New Regime, to snipe at the “Peirpont (sic) clique” who, it claimed, were looting the funds set aside for hundreds of destitute families in Norfolk and Portsmouth.

The fighting reached the White House, and Lincoln had to carefully rein in Butler, who remained politically powerful and could tip the nomination and possibly even the election. Pierpont’s complaints had to be weighed against that reality.

After the election, Pierpont again wrote to Lincoln, this time about Butler’s men seizing the books of a Norfolk tax assessor, which he said was done to hide how much property had been illegally confiscated by the Army. The governor claimed: “At least 30 percent of the real estate in that city is in the hands of the military on which no rent is being paid.” He further charged that the license fees and taxes going to the provost marshal’s office were being used “for speculative purposes.”

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Despite the hullabaloo, Butler might have remained in command if he showed results on the battlefield. Instead, his newly named Army of the James was bottled up at a plantation called Bermuda Hundred, miles short of the Petersburg front, and his attack on Fort Fisher below Wilmington, N.C., on the Cape Fear River proved disastrous, and left Admiral David Dixon Porter furious. In early 1865, Butler was relieved of command.

As to why Butler had been relieved, a Norfolk man who had been jailed by the Union Army, presumably for Confederate sympathies, quipped during a wedding party: “innate depravity.” Pierpont surely would have agreed. He journeyed to Norfolk in February 1865 and spoke at the Mechanics Hall, celebrating the reorganization of civil government in the Tidewater.

In many ways this contretemps between Pierpont and Butler set the stage for postwar confrontations between white-controlled governments and the military districts established to oversee reconstruction. Ironically, the two men’s fortunes switched again: Pierpont was eased out of office in 1868, after which he served a single term in the West Virginia State Legislature, while Butler returned to Massachusetts, where his political career revived. He served five terms in the United States House of Representatives and two years in the governor’s mansion.

Sources: Charles Ambler, “Francis H. Pierpont: Union War Governor of Virginia and Father of West Virginia”; James Alex Baggett, “The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction”; Benjamin F. Butler, “Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler”; Benjamin F. Butler entry in Encyclopedia of Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org; Hamilton J. Eckenrode, “The Political Reconstruction of Virginia”; William C. Harris, “With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union”; Abraham Lincoln to Benjamin F. Butler, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 7, University of Michigan Library Online; Francis H. Pierpont, Executive Correspondence of the Restored Government of Virginia, Virginia State Library and Archives; Francis H. Pierpont to President Abraham Lincoln and Congress, April 4, 1864; Francis H. Pierpont entry in Encyclopedia of Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org; Virginia Calendar of State Papers; The New York Times, June 22 and July 7, 1864; The (Norfolk) New Regime, 1864-1865; The Richmond Dispatch, May 6 and June 4, 1864 and Feb. 20, 1865.

John Grady, a former editor of Navy Times and a retired director of communications at the Association of the United States Army, is completing a biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury. He is also a contributor to the Navy’s Civil War Sesquicentennial blog.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.